One of the biggest things to happen in the digital era was the successful introduction of the compact disc. This new technology offered superior performance and could not be altered by other products for the Empires of sound. The problem with the CD’s was that it was read only and could not be rerecorded. The new digital disc was created with the attention to prevent unauthorized taping of copyrighted music because they knew that the sound was far superior to that of their counter part the audio cassette. Digital production was to advance for the audio cassette and advertisers knew that people would buy the cd’s over cassettes because that sound quality was so much better. The main goal was to have the CD replace vinyl and cassettes with these expensive digital discs.

The technological foundation made it easier to group different types of entertainment into one big business organization. One big business was movie soundtracks. Movie soundtracks were created for one film with pop songs on it that were eventually shown on the big screen. This was a huge disadvantaged to filmmakers because they were pressured to pick music from specific rosters that were backed by the corporate backers record companies. Some of those songs would never make it in the movie anyway. Soundtracks became huge in the 1980’s and 1990’s. They made so much revenue that they became an important means of promoting the film especially all the teenage markets.

As you can see cd’s became a huge part of the digital era because the sound quality was so much better than the cassettes. Little did they know that soon the computer era would come where people would be able to download cd’s illegally and share it with their friends online. As a result cd sales went down dramatically. Most artists today depend on touring to make money because there just isn’t much money in selling cd’s today.

Unfortunately the impact of a bad economy effective tours during the summer. I worked at Jones Beach in sound production and they were given away tickets for 5.00. Some tickets like Rihanna and Kiss had ticket sales as low as $15.00 because the tickets just were not selling due to the economy.

Soundtracks became huge because many of those songs that were recorded for film were not available on artists cd’s. One good example is Aerosmith’s “Don’t want to miss a thing.” This song was on the “Armagedon” soundtrack. When I was a young boy this was one of my favorite songs. I wanted it so bad but did not want to purchase the soundtrack. I was hoping that Aerosmith came out with a new cd that had that song included on it. Unfortunately, that never happened and I was forced to buy the soundtrack because I wanted to hear that song over and over again.

Now we have the option to purchase one song if you like through amazon or itunes. But some of these artist fear, understandably, that all of the hard work into creating an album might be for nothing because casual consumers might be only interested in their hit song. Most people who buy whole albums over the web are usually the die hard fans anyway. I still miss buying cassette singles and 45’s. At least they included B sides in which today, you’ll never see that happening again.